A Corporate
Lifer
Recovers

Changing the Forecast: A Recovering MBA Origin Story 

I was eating a turkey wrap the shape and size of a sock puppet when Geoff looked across the table and said to me:

“You’re a lifer.”

He wasn’t being mean. It was simply an observation, like you have brown eyes, or you drive a Honda, or there’s something green stuck to your front tooth.

“You’re a lifer.”

I laughed awkwardly, but inside, I was processing the comment like a diagnosis that had come out of nowhere.

A lifer?

It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

We were sitting in the company cafeteria, a spectacular space with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking manicured grounds. The building was so starkly modern and white that people called it the Ice Castle.

And like all castles, it had everything you needed to feel like royalty—a beautiful campus, a state-of-the-art fitness centre, generous benefits, and a pension. If there was ever a place to spend a lifetime, this was it.

And I looked like just the person who would live happily in an ice castle.

I had an MBA. My title was Manager, Financial Planning, Pharmaceuticals Business Unit. Despite scoring zero for attention to detail on assorted personality tests, I painfully forecasted more than 300 SKUs, wore sensible business clothes, and attended sensible business meetings.

If my future had been plotted on a graph, the line would have extended with a slight upward trajectory neatly to retirement.

Geoff’s comment made me angry. Not at him, but at myself. I was angry that I had become so comfortable in my discomfort that someone else could see exactly where my life was heading.

I had to change the forecast, so I enrolled in a part-time BA in English and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, earning the degree one night course at a time over ten years.

I still remember settling into one lecture and being introduced to Emily Dickinson’s declaration:

I dwell in Possibility — / A fairer House than Prose —

For years, I had been dwelling in predictability. I realized that possibility wasn’t something waiting for me outside the Ice Castle. It was something I could cultivate right where I was.

I found it in evening lectures, in great books and, perhaps most unexpectedly, in the Ice Castle gym.

There’s something about the appearance of deltoids that rewires your sense of possibility. You lift more than you ever thought you could, and run a half marathon when you never considered yourself to be a runner. Somewhere along the way, the data points predicting your future begin to shift.

While I appeared to be settling in, I was quietly changing the forecast.

When the company merged for the third time since I joined, I took the opportunity to leave for a life of writing, teaching, and fitness.

But that’s not the end of the story.

If you drive along Mississauga Road south of the 407, you can still see the Ice Castle.

The building is still standing, but the company no longer lives there. GSK gradually withdrew almost completely from Canada, and the workforce that had seemed so permanent scattered into temporary offices and severance packages.

The lifer’s career was an illusion.

Geoff did me a favour that day. He showed me my future clearly enough that I could choose a different one. 

The opposite of a lifer isn’t a writer, a teacher, or a fitness instructor.

It’s someone who dwells in possibility.

And that’s the work of a lifetime.